“Our washing machine is in the garage and we can’t hear the beeps to indicate that the wash is complete. I wanted to find a way to get notified, wherever we are in the house, when the cycle was finished. I’ve been tinkering with Arduino, ESP8266 WiFi for some time, and recently started with Blynk - I thought this might provide a relatively simple but flexible solution.
My initial thoughts were to use the washing machine to power the Arduino, and connect the washing machine buzzer to a digitial input pin to trigger the notification. After a few hours investigating the washing machine controls, without a circuit diagram, and a couple of unexpected electric shocks (even after tesing connections, pins with my multimeter …) I decided that a less invasive approach would be better …
With help from Mr Google and a rummage through my Arduino sensor boxes I settled on a vibration sensor attached to the outside of the washing machine, connected to WiFi, and the Blynk platform to manage the push notification to our phones (I tried email and twitter, but these were less immediate and required additional alert/notification settings on the iPhone).
This instructable will describe what you will need (hardware, app and Arduino code); tips and lessons learnt along the way - for Arduino, ESP8266 (on a WEMOS D1 Mini Pro board).
Lets get started …”